Tesla lost $293M last quarter, says 80k deliveries will happen this year

Another quarter, another miss for Tesla's earnings estimates. That's the takeaway point from the 2Q 2016 Shareholder letter the automaker sent out today after the stock market closed. The electric vehicle maker had a net loss of $293 million in the second quarter, up from $184 million in the second quarter of 2015. Nonetheless, Tesla's revenue was up 33 percent to $1.27 billion for the quarter.

There's some good news in the letter, too. Tesla says it is "consistently" building almost 2,000 vehicles each week, which is helping it to remain "on track to support 50,000 deliveries in [the second half of] 2016." Tesla delivered 14,402 vehicles globally last quarter, 9,764 Model S sedans and 4,638 Model X SUVs. On a conference call with investors this evening, Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler said, "We are clearly disappointed with our delivery numbers." Once again, Tesla is saying that things that happen at the end of the reporting period have a big impact on the numbers:

We delivered fewer cars in Q2 than originally planned as a result of our steep production ramp, which resulted in almost half of Q2 production occurring in the final four weeks of the quarter. Given inflection points in the production ramp and firm shipping cutoffs, shifting production by even a short period of time had a disproportionate impact on the number of cars that were delivered by quarter end.

This marks the 13th straight quarterly loss. TSLA shares were down $1.41 today to $225.79, a drop of 0.62 percent, but are up so far in aftermarket trading.

Also, during the call CEO Elon Musk said that in order to have fully autonomous vehicles, Tesla will need higher-resolution maps "than currently exist in the world." Musk said Tesla is working on them, but that he wanted to keep the details secret for now. He also said the he was optimistic that Tesla would hit its goals of, "exit[ing] Q3 with a steady production rate of 2,200 vehicles per week, and plan to increase production to 2,400 vehicles per week in Q4," as stated in the shareholder letter.